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Behind the Cover Story: Sara Corbett on Collaborating With Amanda Lindhout to Tell a Harrowing Tale

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Behind the Cover Story: Sara Corbett on Collaborating With Amanda Lindhout to Tell a Harrowing Tale

By Rachel Nolan September 2, 2013 7:19 amSeptember 2, 2013 7:19 am

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Sara CorbettCredit Melissa Mullen

Sara Corbett is the co-author of this week’s cover story told from the point of view of Amanda Lindhout, a young woman who was kidnapped and held captive in Somalia for 460 days. The article is adapted from the book the two wrote together about Lindhout’s experience, “A House in the Sky,” published this month. Corbett, a contributing writer to the magazine, last wrote about the artist Shea Hembrey.

You have been working with Amanda on this book now for about three years. How did you first get in touch with her or interested in the story?

I first met Amanda in the spring of 2010, only a few months after she’d been freed from captivity. We were introduced by Robert Draper — a friend and fellow contributing writer at the magazine. Robert had been staying at the Shamo Hotel in Mogadishu, on assignment for National Geographic, the same week that Amanda and Nigel were there. It later seemed evident that the kidnappers had been aiming to capture Robert and his photographer colleague that day, but instead ended up with the freelancers. After Amanda was released, she reconnected with Robert. Later when she expressed interest in writing a book, Robert and I flew to Canada together and spent a few days with Amanda, listening to the story she had to tell.

I’m not particularly drawn to hostage stories, but this one was fascinating. She’d had an unusual and up-close look at the radicalization of a group of young men, which struck me as deeply relevant to our times. Also, during my early research on Amanda, I’d stumbled across a YouTube video that one of her former traveling companions had posted online. It was called something like “Amanda in Happier Times” and it showed this exuberant young woman out in the world — crossing borders, riding on the rooftop a truck on the Karakorum Highway in Pakistan, having tea with street vendors in Calcutta. What I saw there was a portrait of what it meant to be free and female in the post-9/11 world and that, more than anything, compelled me to want to know who she was and how she eventually landed in Somalia. Our book is an attempt to explore the whole trajectory, the extremes of both freedom and deprivation.

I’m curious about the process of writing this book. Was it a series of long interviews with Amanda or did you talk to everyone else to the extent possible?

It was both. Amanda and I worked intensively together. Our interviews went on for days on end. At one point we rented a really remote house in the Bahamas together and spent seven straight days in conversation. A big part of the process was building a level of trust, so that we could explore all the corners of her experience in the most emotionally precise way possible. She shared her journals, correspondences and at one point shipped me her old laptop so I could have access to everything on her hard drive. It took that level of openness for us to work successfully. But on top of that, Amanda also encouraged me to put my journalistic skills to use. I interviewed her family, talked with her friends and old traveling companions, and spent time in Nairobi interviewing Somali people connected to her case, including Abdifatah Elmi, the cameraman who also was held hostage by the same group.
How did Amanda manage to remember everything in such detail? Through talking about it, did she recall the memories? It must have also been enormously painful.

In my very first conversation with Amanda, I was struck by how unusual and sharp her recall for detail is. As someone who interviews people for a living, I recognized right away that she was capable of telling her story with the kind of vivid immediacy that sometimes gets lost in co-authored books. Our process was slow and careful and also involved sharing a lot of pain. Neither one of us wanted to produce a quickie, ripped-from-the-headlines type of book: We strove to tell the story with dignity. I think it was very, very tough on Amanda at times, but I also saw firsthand the resilience she possesses, the very quality that allowed her to survive 15 months as a hostage and go on to dedicate herself to helping the people of Somalia. She was committed to telling this story. She never gave up. She willfully put herself back into Somalia in her memory, again and again, as we worked on each paragraph. She, like me, felt there was real value in voicing the experience.

Some of the commenters have questioned Amanda’s decision to enter Somalia in the first place. Is this an issue you address in the book?

Absolutely, it’s addressed in the book. Amanda will be the first to tell you that she regrets the decision. But she was young and hopeful and also ambitious. Beyond that, Somalia is one of a number of places in the world where journalists take great risks to do their jobs. Why? Because there’s a larger function served. Because of the violent and seemingly unending war in Somalia, its people have suffered in tremendous ways. Children join militias. Education has been disrupted. Millions of people have starved. On the day they were kidnapped, Amanda and Nigel were headed toward an I.D.P. (internally displaced persons) settlement run by a heroic Somali doctor named Hawa Abdi, who started a health clinic on her family’s land and before long had upward of 80,000 displaced people camped on or near her property. To me, that’s a story worth telling and worth hearing about. Does it sometimes take a young and hopeful and also ambitious freelancer to reach places like this and tell stories like these? I believe so.

There’s no easy parable to be found in Amanda’s story — right/wrong, good/bad — which is what, for me, makes it more truthful and compelling. Criticizing her for going to Somalia seems like a simplistic and possibly sexist way to dismiss a woman who is telling a bold story.

It is standard practice for governments not to pay ransom to kidnappers, assuming that this will only encourage more kidnappings. Doesn’t that put an enormous amount of pressure on not-very-wealthy families?

Hostage-taking is a global epidemic. It’s a staggeringly huge, criminal and often profitable business. I’ve now read accounts by a number of former hostages and their family members, and nearly everyone gets caught in the same agonizing jeopardy: trying to get their loved ones home safely but without further fueling the enterprise. It’s a basically impossible situation. Many governments, for very good reason, refuse to engage in financial negotiations with hostage-takers. But it can also leave a family in a wrenching position. Amanda and Nigel’s families spent nearly a year trying to work through government channels to get them released, but ultimately — after much debate and worry, after both their children had suffered considerably — felt it was necessary to hire a private security firm and raise ransom money.

How was Amanda finally released?

The full story can be found in the book. But Amanda’s kidnapping ended much like it began, with a swerving, heart-pounding car ride through the desert, many men with guns and a lot of confusion. She and Nigel were supposed to fly out of Mogadishu that night — Nov. 25, 2009 — but their car was shot at as they approached the airport and they were forced to turn back. The photo in the magazine that shows Amanda and Nigel after their release was taken the following morning, when they were still in Somalia and not entirely safe. She was reunited with her mother at a hospital in Nairobi later that day, which marked the moment she felt free.

Did she ever find out the identity of the woman in the mosque, who you describe so vividly?

To this day, we don’t know who the woman in the mosque was or how she fared after that incident. What we do know is that she risked everything to be kind.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…